Four Images of False Positives: A Visual Essay

This article examines a case of illegal state violence known as False Positives—extrajudicial executions of civilians, whose corpses were then made to look like guerrillas or members of illegal groups killed in combat—carried out by the Colombian Army during the years of the Democratic Security and Defense policy (2002–10). The corpses of victims of False Positives were dressed in fatigues and weapons were placed next to their bodies in order to take a photograph as proof of military success. This article analyzes four of these images as media objects of war to understand how an enemy is represented in these fabrications made by members of the security apparatus of the state. This article poses the following questions to those images: is this how an enemy should look, and if so, why?